He was absent for about twenty minutes.  When he returned, they had finished the game of snooker pool without him and were all sitting on the lounge by the side of the billiard table, talking of the war.  Granet listened for a few minutes and then said good-night a little abruptly.  He lit his candle outside and went slowly to his room.  Arrived there, he glanced at his watch and locked the door.  It was half-past eleven.  He changed his clothes quickly, put on some rubber-soled shoes and slipped a brandy flask and a revolver into his pocket.  Then he sat down before his window with his watch in his hand.  He was conscious of a certain foreboding from which he had never been able to escape since his arrival.  In France and Belgium he had lived through fateful hours, carrying more than once his life in his hands.  His risk to-night was an equal one but the exhilaration seemed lacking.  This work in a country apparently at peace seemed somehow on a different level.  If it were less dangerous, it was also less stimulating.  In those few moments the soldier blood in him called for the turmoil of war, the panorama of life and death, the fierce, hot excitement of juggling with fate while the heavens themselves seemed raining death on every side.  Here there was nothing but silence, the soft splash of the distant sea, the barking of a distant dog.  The danger was vivid and actual but without the stimulus of that blood-red background.  He glanced at his watch.  It wanted still ten minutes to twelve.  For a moment then he suffered his thoughts to go back to the new thing which had crept into his life.  He was suddenly back in the Milan, he saw the backward turn of her head, the almost wistful look in her eyes as she made her little pronouncement.  She had broken her engagement.  Why?  It was a battle, indeed, he was fighting with that still, cold antagonist, whom he half despised and half feared, the man concerning whose actual personality he had felt so many doubts.  What if things should go wrong to-night, if the whole dramatic story should be handed over for the glory and wonder of the halfpenny press!  He could fancy their headlines, imagine even their trenchant paragraphs.  It was skating on the thinnest of ice—­and for what?  His fingers gripped the damp window-sill.  He raised himself a little higher.  His eyes fell upon his watch—­still a minute or two to twelve.  Slowly he stole to his door and listened.  The place was silent.  He made his way on tiptoe across the landing and entered Collins’ room.  The latter was seated before the wide-open window.  He had blown out his candle and the room was in darkness.  He half turned his head at Granet’s entrance.

“Two minutes!” he exclaimed softly.  “Granet, it will be to-night.  Are you ready?”

“Absolutely!”

They stood by the open window in silence.  Nothing had changed.  It was not yet time for the singing of the earliest birds.  The tiny village lay behind them, silent and asleep; in front, nothing but the marshes, uninhabited, lonely and quiet, the golf club-house empty and deserted.  They stood and watched, their faces turned steadfastly in a certain direction.  Gradually their eyes, growing accustomed to the dim and changing light, could pierce the black line above the grey where the sea came stealing up the sandy places with low murmurs, throwing with every wave longer arms into the land.